20 for 0.19 - Part 1

I bought 20 games on steam sale for 0.19 cent each, provided they were rated good or better on Steam. This is a post in progress.

1.) Well. The first one, BEEP,  I could play for 2 minutes. Some unpleasing but solid vector graphics, some robot default story, you play the robots in a frowning but surly having its fans jump and run.

Well the whole thing is not working for me, the design is unstructured. But the music is quite good !
The first time my robot dropped into an abyss, I quit the game.

2.) Defy Gravity Extended. Actually, this one has a good idea I never saw before. You can make gravity and anti-gravity balls with your gun. You combine these two to master the laser traps and big gaps in this platformer. That's, after dying a lot, actually makes fun a few minutes.

But, yes but, the graphic is minimalistic and not very nice, the music is too heavy and too much artificial orchestra synthetic, yet composed well. Just not for that game or setting, imho.
But really interesting idea.


3.) Out there somewhere

That one, also a platformer, is well done. It is pure pixelart . You start in side scroller, but eventually your ship gets shot down, and you have to find the parts on the planet you crashed to fix your ship to fight the guy who shot you down in a platformer on the ground.

The pixel art of the levels is well done and works, the teleport gun is a nice way of opening new kinds of puzzles beyond simple timing of jumps.

The music is perfectly adequate. This one I surly will play again.

4.) Then I started a game called "The Albino Hunter", and its obviously some 2D tile birds perspektive rpg-maker game. After 30 seconds I had to quit cause it was too dazzling.

This is it for today.

Free Steam Weekend ARK : Survival Evolved

Well, I thought its free, it looks nice AND IT HAS DINOS !

I downloaded the 6.5 GB on friday and remembered it just an hour ago.

It is early access, and it costs 30 bugs. Hmm. The first time I ran it it crashed with an OpenGL error.

The next time it worked when I joined an official server and I had fun making an absurd looking character, actually, I can not remember a game where you can misuse the body parameters like that.

Actually here I was first annoyed by the cheap looking user interface.

Then I joined the world and had a FPS of five while the resolution was 1600:900 and it looked bad.
I managed to put it on native resolution and put it on medium. Still it was unsharp, ugly and not 16:9 !

Ok, I thought and started to walk around. Some wood structures were placed by someone on a beach.
Then I saw my first dinosaurs. It was a friendly one so I punched it with my bare hands. It attacked me. Well. It tried. It rotated itself on the place and then started to walk into a tree where it got stucked.

I walked around, got some green jelly into my eyes from some small jumpy thing, yes, the one out of Jurassic Park that killed the traitor.

Then I tried to get smart of the user interface, but it looked so ugly and unstructured I lost my interest fast.

Well. It is early access. It was free. Perhaps they can fix all these things, cause it certainly is a nice idea and the graphics as far as I can say it are really nice, I at least imagine.

Couldnt resist : Humble BANDAI NAMCO Bundelö

So, Japan, ey ?

Well. I recently tried to find out more about the chinese game market, but actually, that was much more effort than I thought ! Language, structure, design...everything is different and strange than in western game university.

So I bought this Japan Bundle from BANDAI NAMCO,  mainly cause I am curious and I want that 10$ game.

So, let me play. :D

1.Platformines

This is a retro block 2D platform game. Do not get me wrong, it is well made, but at the same time looks and feels like someone just started and then went on for some time without really having a concept.

The music is ok, the graphics ok, the gameplay I HAVE NO CLUE. Perhaps some other time, but the first 15 minutes were like a big WTF that ended in boredom.




2. Dead Core

No clue what the f*ck this is. It looks like someone did a mediocre 3D jump and run platformer and was forced to watch Tron 100.000 times before that. Seriously. The UI is uninspired, the atmosphere is boring and the story non existing. I jumped around five minutes, then I quit.





3. Ace Combat Assault Horizon - Enhanced Edition

First I was thrilled, finally a good air craft shooter sim with decent looking wide open terrain.
Then I played this game from 2011. I did not even make a screenshot. The menus look ugly.
The music is boring. The graphics are 2011, but not even that bad. But the gameplay.
What the F*CK.

The intro mission is unclear, you autopilot, at least I think it was flying from itself, behind some other aircraft, I think, for no clear reason, which seem to be part of a nightmare the pilot has. Then after trying to do anything, it told me to press C. I pressed C. Then it told me to use the arrow key to turn right. I did that. Nothing really happen
d though. And then I crashed. For no real reason. On the floor.

Then I closed the game and deleted it from my harddrive. wtf.

4. Dark Souls™: Prepare To Die™ Edition

I was looking forward to this, and well. It is a console port. BUT it really looks good. The lighting is perfect, the whole feeling is glitchy and dark and wet and yikes. You start in a dungeon.

And this, yes, this is a dungeon. Then you come to a first big room and a big, big ugly daemon is blocking your way. Well. Here I actually quit, cause well, you have a freaking small knife and all the doors are looked. And a hit of my knife did actually 1/128 of damage to the enemy.

It looks really good. I think one of these days I will get one of my controllers and play this baby as it were a console, despite my dislike of direct console-2-pc games.

What's a bundle worth $2.000 dollars ? Right, a game making bundle

Since I bought the Humble Bundle Game Making Bundle just for the full version of Spriter, I thought, while doing the "serious" things with Unity3D, I could try these "cheesy" looking game making tools that were bundled with the Game Making Bundle.

And I could actually look at the Artwork & Stuff, since I have a license for it, perhaps there is something useful in it.

So this Article is WIP, since I will test them more deeply when I find the time.

Actually, I found this Post on this blog, which basically did what I wanted to do, and since I do not have the time right now, you can here find some good info about the bundle !

How to waste a sunday ! #1

Oh, it is Sunday !? Time to read deep philosophical material, learn some new javascript shit, meet friends or learn to survive with only two meters of nylon ? NO !

Let me rather waste some precious time on those games that are buried deep inside my steam games library vault, ok ?

Halfway through ?

First I found Halfway, a game published by the makers of Starbound, which I rather enjoyed, before I found the third high security prison planet in a row, Chucklefish.

It is from 2014, nice pixel art, and it is a tactical based RPG using the good old isometric view. Good looking interface, atmospheric music.





Could it have something to do with that SOS call ?

Story ? Ah yeah, it's a generic "Hey, big corporations are ruling, send out big ships to colonize the galaxy, but suddenly, ops, the ships are not coming back and vanish without a trace." story line. And of course, you play on of the guys on that first vanishing ship. So much for pathos, but ok !

Well done. But hey.

It seems to be very well done. It is clearly a child of the retro pixel art hype, but seems to be a very solid of its kind. When I want to play a Iso-Tactical-RPG I still want to finish Shadowrun and some other first. If you are into retro pixel art and this genre, this might be interesting, I am a bit bored by the story, though. But it will stay in my library, for sure.

Borderlands 2

Long time no read, fellow game-players.

But : I played a bit but did not find the time to write it down here. And besides, I am actually starting to play games more and more analytic, since after a year of intense catching up I think I am mostly up-to-date.

So I will try to get into that what actually amazes me about games : their mechanics, their rules and most of all, the additional level a game gets when multiplayer comes into play.

I bought Borderlands 2 in a steam sale, and I must say, besides being a dumb FPS, it actually is a very suitable game to study. So I hope I can remember and read all my thoughts and notes while playing it, cause you can see most of the concepts of newer and older (FPS) games coming together here in a funny yet absurd brutal way.

Stay tuned.

Lemons, Shadowruns and Transistors

Since life is giving me lemons and forces me to drink it, but I am allergic to lemon juice...well...you get the drill.

I had time to check out Shadowrun Returns.

I am a big cyberpunk fan (also the pen und paper RPG), but I always had a strange feeling about mixing fantasy and cyberpunk.

And that's what Shadowrun is. Well, the crowd funded game is actually quite interesting. If you like stylish hand drawn tile iso graphic and a lot of good written text, then Shadow Run returns is something you will enjoy.

The fighting system is a bit too similar to XCOM, but hey, you can not do everything original. Or so they say.

Also I checked out Transistor. I mention that here cause the design is somewhat similar to the design of Shadowrun Returns, at least in my perception.

What I like about Transistor is the somewhat innovative mixing of real time and round-base fighting.

The music, praised by so many, is ok, but the female singer can't pronounce the th correctly. It is a minor detail, but it really confused me. Perhaps this is even wanted ?